Monday, May 14, 2012

Crown versus defence resources

In today's Globe Dirk Derstine comments -- perhaps it did not make a difference in Rafferty but how many accused are convicted, wrongfully (?), because there were not the resources to, say, hire an expert or to rereview videos?

"The biggest thing was not so much the amount of attention but the extraordinary volume of disclosure and the extraordinary amount of resources in the prosecution. I don't know that there's ever been a case in Canada that's had this much of an investigation behind it. We were given in the realm of 5 to 10 per cent of the resources the Crown attorneys had to prepare for this case. The amount of videotaped interviews alone eclipsed by a factor of six the amount of preparation hours I had."